▼ Fixing ssUrlPrefix for HTTPS (vs HTTP)

If you host a site studio site using HTTPS, you may notice some links being incorrectly generated by server-side scripts (ie. ssGetServerRelativePath); specifically, the home page "URL Directory Name" being used as a prefix. This results in broken links, but are otherwise valid when viewed via HTTP.

The reason for this is because the value of ssUrlPrefix changes when using HTTPS (most likely "/home/") vs. HTTP ("/"). Unless you want your homepage to be, for example, http://stellentpmp.blogspot.com/home instead of http://stellentpmp.blogspot.com, ssUrlPrefix should be consistent throughout the site.

So how do we fix this?

The answer is simpler than you think.  Login to the content server and navigate to Administration » Site Studio Administration » Manage Web Site Addresses. Typically, you have one web site address for each web site hosted on the content server, but you need to add a second address with the SSL port for each web site that uses HTTPS, like so:

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Web Site: [select your web site]
Address: [your web site address]:[SSL port]

For example:
Web Site: stellentpmp (stellentpmp.blogspot.com)
Address: stellentpmp.blogspot.com:443

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If you're interested in why you need to do this and/or how I figured this out, read on. Otherwise, thank you for reading :)

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After identifying ssUrlPrefix as the root cause, I had to determine how it was generated. I started by looking in the "ss_layout_head_info" resource, but the js ssUrlPrefix variable was simply populated by the idoc ssUrlPrefix variable.

In order to find how ssUrlPrefix is generated on the java/idoc side, I started by decompiling the SSScriptExtensions class to find the ssGetServerRelativePath idoc script extension (the server-side script that was causing the problem). That calls SSHierarchyServiceHandler.getServerRelativeUrl, which ultimately calls getServerRelativeSiteRoot.

It's within this method that I found a new undocumented tracing section: sitestudio-urlproduction. Countless traces are seen in the server output with this turned on, but none stood out more than this:

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getServerRelativeSiteRoot: generating link to site 'stellentpmp.blogspot.com' from browser host 'http://stellentpmp.blogspot.com:443'.

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It instantly struck me as odd, so I debugged further along this path. The above trace is output right before calling SSUrlMap.getDomainWithHostPrefix. It's within this function that I saw comparisons made to cached objects, domain names, and site addresses; however, none referencing HTTPS or SSL ports.  And from this, I made the inference that is the focus of this post :) Voila!